Nokia agreed to acquire Elenion a start-up developing silicon photonics-based System-on-Chip solutions that can be produced in a CMOS foundry. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Elenion, which was founded in 2014 and is based in New York City, develops highly integrated, low-cost silicon photonics technologies for short-reach and high-performance optical interfaces and has pioneered a design toolset which enables a greatly simplified, low cost, scalable manufacturing process. The Elenion platform simplifies integration with optical chipsets, lowers power consumption, improves port density and helps to lower the overall cost per bit for network operators.
Nokia said Elenion's state-of-the-art silicon photonics design platform improves product costs by bringing simplification and scale to the optical supply chain. It is expected to bring time-to-market and cost advantages to Nokia’s broad portfolio of networking solutions.
Sam Bucci, Head of Optical Networking at Nokia, said: “As a world-class provider of silicon photonics solutions, advanced packaging and custom design services, Elenion provides a strong strategic fit for Nokia. Its solutions can be readily integrated into Nokia’s product offerings and address multiple high growth segments including 5G, cloud and data center networking. When combined with Nokia, Elenion technologies will accelerate the growth and scale of Nokia’s optical networking business, while enabling us to cost-effectively address new markets.”
Larry Schwerin, CEO of Elenion Technologies, said: “Nokia is an industry leader in networking systems, including advanced coherent optical interfaces and hyperscale datacenter solutions. Elenion benefits by having its technology incorporated into an industry-leading portfolio and with a company offering solutions across a wide array of networking applications. Nokia’s strong optical industry leadership, size, scale, global reach, and ongoing commitment to investment in key technologies vastly accelerates the adoption of Elenion silicon photonics technology.”
Elenion debuts Silicon Photonic BGA Packaged Coherent Optical Sub-Assembly
The CSTAR-200 is a DSP agnostic, coherent optical engine that enables pluggables such as CFP2-DCO and on-board applications, from data center interconnect to long haul in 100/200G coherent optical communication links.
“We are excited to be partnering with Elenion on our award winning CFP2-DCO. Elenion’s CSTAR platform allows us to offer differentiated coherent solutions to our customers,” said Siraj ElAhmadi, President & General Manager, Menara Networks.
The CSTAR platform comprises a multi-chip-module (MCM) and integrates Elenion’s advanced Silicon Photonics and RFICs. Integrated into a non-hermetic BGA package, CSTAR offers the next generation coherent optical engine for todays and future 100 to 600Gb/s Network applications.
“From the beginning at Elenion, we’ve built our silicon photonic chips in a production CMOS fab, which enables us to build complex optical devices. Having leveraged on-chip complexity to eliminate all of the isolators, lenses, and other free space optics from our package, Elenion is taking these chips and having them assembled in a production electronics-attach environment, reusing the infrastructure investment from the ASIC industry. We believe that this is a milestone for the silicon photonics industry, and represents an inflection point with regard to the cost of packaging for silicon photonics and integrated photonic components in general,” said Michael Hochberg, CTO, Elenion.
